Fauci’s Moment of Truth

Anthony Fauci has been lauded as America’s great defender of the sciences. Time Magazine named Fauci and frontline healthcare workers their ‘Persons of the Year’ in 2020, stating “In Washington, Dr. Anthony Fauci led not only the battle against COVID-19 but also the fight for truth—clear, consistent messaging being fundamental to public health. With steadfast integrity, Fauci nudged, elided and gently corrected a President used to operating in a reality of his own construction, buoyed by the fervent repetition of lies.” In 2021, Fauci went so far to say that he was the last word on science in the United States. “It’s very dangerous, Chuck, because a lot of what you’re seeing as attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science, because all of the things that I have spoken about consistently from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science,” Fauci told host Chuck Todd on MSNBC.

What a moment of comeuppance it must have been today on Capitol Hill, when Fauci, the former head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), and the leader of the COVID-19 Pandemic response for both Presidents Donald J. Trump and Joseph Biden, admitted that much of his public policies on COVID were, in fact, based on no science whatsoever.

In testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Fauci conceded the scientific evidence for many of his most widely distributed health policies, the six-foot rule, was…nil.

Q: Did you see any studies that supported six feet? A: I was not aware of studies that — in fact, that would be a very difficult study to do. Q: I know. I’m just trying to figure out why six versus three or four or five. A: Yeah. Yeah. Q: Like, six is a significant distance. I mean, you’ve testified here. I think you testified in front of Mr. Scalise a couple times when I was working for him. And recalling the hearing rooms, instead of, like, seven members on the top of the dais, there’s two, and – A: Right. Q: — it was just two staffers behind. A: Yeah. Yeah. I think it would fall under the category of empiric. Just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished. But I’m thinking hard as I’m talking to you. Q: Uh-huh. A: I don’t recall, like, a discussion of, “Now it’s going to be” — it sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance.

Fauci was later forced to admit that this lack of science wasn’t limited to the six foot rule. Regarding masking of toddlers and infants:

Q: All right. Thank you. Another question that we get a lot in the masking space is the masking of children, particularly kids down to 2 years old. A: Right. Q: The WHO recommended against masking children less than five because masks are, and I’m quoting them, 'Not in the overall interest of the child,' and then against children six to eleven from wearing masks because, and, again, quoting, 'Of the potential impact of wearing a mask on learning and psychological development.' Was there ever a cost-benefit analysis done on the unintended consequences of masking kids versus the protection that it would give them? A: Not to my knowledge. Q: Do you recall reviewing any studies or data supporting masking for children? A: You know, I might have, Mitch, but I don’t recall specifically that I did. I might have. Q: Since the — there’s been a lot of studies that have come out since the pandemic started, but specifically on this there have been significant on kind of like the learning loss and speech and development issues that have been associated with particularly young children wearing masks while they’re growing up. They can’t see their teacher talk and can’t learn how to form words. Have you followed any of those studies? A: No. But I believe that there are a lot of conflicting studies too, that there are those that say, yes, there is an impact, and there are those that say there’s not. I still think that’s up in the air. I mean, I’m very sensitive to children. I have children and I have grandchildren. So I don’t want to have anything that would do to harm them.

In short, 4 years after the COVID pandemic ravaged this country and the world at large, Anthony Fauci — the world’s leading infectious disease expert — had to admit in open, public testimony that the leading policies they enforced were based on little more than gut feelings and faith-based beliefs.

Fauci tried to argue that the lack of data and confusion over the physiology of the COVID-19 coronavirus helped cause these mistakes. But even that is false. From the earliest days of the pandemic, even from early information from Communist China, evidence showed that the policies they supported weren’t based on any facts whatsoever.

These facts compound the errors made by the U.S. scientific community. Evidence is now clear that Fauci led an effort to forcefully dismiss claims that a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source of the COVID-19 pandemic.

On February 1, 2020, Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Francis Collins, then director of the National Institutes of Health, held a call with several scientists to discuss the origin of the virus. A group of evolutionary virologists on the call informed Fauci and Collins that Covid may have stemmed from a lab accident and may have been genetically engineered, according to the memo.

Three days later, four experts who attended that meeting drafted a research document, which was forwarded to Fauci upon completion for editing and approval. The paper, later published in Nature Medicine, argued that Covid had “mutations” that supported the explanation that it had been transmitted to humans from animals.

One of the four authors, Dr. Kristin Andersen, admits in a cover email sent to Nature that Fauci “prompted” the paper’s drafting in order to “disprove” the lab leak theory.

This paper was published in February 2020, as the pandemic was exploding worldwide. Fauci referred reporters to the study at that time, conveniently failing to disclose that he was intimately involved in its drafting. Even in today’s hearing, Fauci continues to deny he did anything wrong and has never admitted that he was involved with the study before it was published.

If this scientific fraud and dishonesty wasn’t enough, Fauci and his band of merry men compounded this by enacting a clear, intentional policy to hide their discussions from the public view, by purposely hiding from the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Documents show that Dr. David Morens, who served as Fauci’s primary advisor at NIAID, used his private email account to discuss the origins of Covid-19 with EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak. They had discussions on how to hide these efforts from public view, proven by emails released last month by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Fauci has repeatedly denied knowing about the efforts to evade Congressional oversight.

Whether Fauci was involved with the concerted effort by scientists to hide their discussions or not, this goes to the larger effort by the entire Federal scientific community, led by Fauci himself, to hide their honest communications regarding the science. It took four years, and 1.2 million American deaths, for many of these facts to come to light.

Compounding this absolute failure is the fact that the Biden administration has gone out of its way to hide his administration’s complicity. The White House has blocked every Congressional effort to have a non-partisan independent commission study the response to the pandemic and make recommendations on how to improve the system for future infections.

With the growing evidence of at least the possibility that the virus came from a Chinese laboratory, most scientists feel we must have more transparency on the entire issue, to ensure the public gains trust in the system again. Most other major countries have had extensive investigations into the matter; the vast majority admit that major mistakes led to unnecessary infringements of individual freedom, not to mention unnecessary morbidity and mortality. But here in the United States, we are still awaiting any such honesty.

Some Democrats have slowly started admitting these failures. In testimony that brought to light the actions of EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak and the communications with Dr. Martens, Democrat California congressman Raul Ruiz, a physician himself, was critical of the questioning during the Congressional hearing. Ruiz and a few other Democrats now concede there was wrongdoing, including the actions of EcoHealth that hid some of the risky viral studies being done in China. For example, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services suspended funding to EcoHealth last month, based partially on the work of Ruiz and others.

“When we have the next emerging virus that’s a pandemic and is killing thousands of people daily, do you think that they’re going to look back and say, ‘Oh, thank goodness, we caught that misconduct,’” Ruiz said. “Do you think identifying this misbehavior is somehow going to lead to better protective equipment, better protective protocols so that we can respond to the [next] pandemic and save lives? … I personally don’t think so.”

To be fair, Republicans are certainly culpable in this ever-growing politicization of science. In today’s hearing, firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly attacked Dr. Fauci personally, without actually bringing any additional facts to light. Such superficial partisan games clearly do not advance the cause of science, nor better government policy.